nothing but the dry rustling of her scales moving over the worn stone slabs. She reached the second floor and set off on her way to the west wing in the dim glow of the nocturnal lighting.
Signora Falchi had stopped firing; maybe she had run out of ammunition. The handle of the door of her room was blocked on the outside by an iron rod. Rosa saw three bullet holes in the oaken door, the splinters pointing out into the corridor. It would be impossible for the tutor to open the barricaded door from the inside.
She looked attentively around her and waited until her eyes were used to the darkness. No one in sight. Michele and Valerie must have locked the tutor in her room. She was probably safer there than anywhere.
Rosa glided on to Costanza’s old bedroom. The door was open; the lock had been broken. It seemed that after Rosa left Iole had locked Valerie in again after all—but in vain.
Valerie was gone. There was no sign of Sarcasmo either. Rosa was sick with worry about Iole, and the disappearance of the dog made it no better. Had Michele done the girl any harm? Had he shot Sarcasmo? And where was Alessandro?
She quickly moved on to her own room and found it untouched. In the dressing room she returned to human form, slipped into jeans and a T-shirt, feeling dazed, and stole barefoot out into the hallway. There was a cupboard with a lock in the study. Florinda had kept a pistol and ammunition there.
Cautiously, she snuck down the dark corridors, going from niche to niche, immersed in deep shadow. Where two passages met, she stumbled upon the corpse of Gianni. Rosa turned away and ran on.
Her skin was stinging as if she had grazed it, but it showed neither injuries nor reddened patches. Maybe her brain hadn’t yet fully registered that she was not a snake anymore. Her joints, too, felt like unfamiliar structures that she would have to accustom herself to using.
She listened for voices, sounds, footsteps. Nothing. But the palazzo walls were thick, and the old tapestries on the walls swallowed up most noises.
What would she do in Michele’s place? He wanted revenge, because he thought Alessandro had given orders for the murder of the Carnevares. Part of his retribution was to be Rosa’s death. When he had failed to find her at the palazzo, he must have questioned Iole. She had probably told him, truthfully, that Rosa had driven off in her car, and upon hearing that, he had surely begun searching the whole place for her—a hopeless undertaking, considering all its countless rooms and corridors. It made little difference whether Valerie had helped him or had stayed to guard Iole, particularly once the Hundinga began laying siege to the walls. Michele would have had no time to be thorough in his search; the attack must have taken him as much by surprise as it had Iole and Signora Falchi. Presumably he was nervous now. And a nervous man would make mistakes.
The study lay at the end of a long corridor on the third floor and had no door; the only way in was a rounded archway, making it almost impossible to get there unseen. In human form she would stand no chance. Even so, she put off her transformation, because she could sense that shifting shape back and forth so quickly was putting a strain on her strength. She had no idea what she could demand of her body. Biologically, the metamorphoses might be impossible to explain, but that didn’t mean that they left no trace behind. Strictly speaking, with every transformation Rosa broke all her bones. In the long run that was bound to have some effect on her physical structure, her circulation, and her metabolism.
To get to the second floor, she used one of the former servants’ staircases. The days of valets and lady’s maids were long gone, and the narrow steps that they had once used were dusty and covered with cobwebs.
She entered a corridor on the upper floor through a thin door behind a curtain. There was no one in sight, and no lamp on apart from the faint, sulfurous illumination of the nocturnal lighting. For the first time, she thought she heard voices, but when she held her breath and listened hard, there was only silence.
On bare feet, she hurried beyond the curtain and turned right. The study was in the north wing, looking out over the inner